Explanation:
Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly
constellation
Corvus, two large galaxies are
colliding.
The stars in the two galaxies, cataloged as
NGC 4038
and NGC 4039, very rarely collide in the course of the
ponderous cataclysm,
lasting hundreds of millions of years.
But their large clouds of
molecular
gas and dust often do, triggering furious
episodes of star formation near the center of the
cosmic wreckage.
Spanning about 500 thousand light-years, this
stunning composited view also reveals new star clusters and
matter flung far from the scene
of the accident by
gravitational
tidal forces.
The remarkable collaborative image is a mosaic constructed
using data from
small and large ground-based telescopes to bring out large-scale
and faint tidal streams, composited with the
bright cores
imaged in extreme detail by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Of course,
the suggestive visual appearance of the extended arcing structures
gives the galaxy pair its popular name - The Antennae.